The Talos Principle 1080p, 60fps On PS4; No Xbox One Version Inbound

One of the upcoming games for the PlayStation 4 comes from the Serious Sam developers CroTeam; it's called The Talos Principle. The title is a first-person puzzler that sees players venturing around using unorthodox methods to progress through the game. Well, the resolution and frame-rate has been outlined for the PS4 version of the game and it meets the standards of eighth-gen's holy grail.

Gaming Bolt managed to get in word with CroTeam's chief technical officer Alen Ladavac and programmer Dean Sekulic, who talked about the performance specs for The Talos Principle on the PS4 as well as the status of the game on the Xbox One... or rather, why it's not coming to the Xbox One, for now.

As per usual, Gaming Bolt asked if the game would be running at native 1920 x 1080p and 60 frames per second on the PS4, to which programmer Dean Sekulic commented...

“Yes. This is still work in progress, but we’re very close to that. Our average frame rate is not an issue (well above 60FPS), but there are still some places in the game where minimum frame rate is in 50′s range. These things need a bit more polishing,”

It's easy to see how a game like The Talos Principle could push the PS4 to its limits. The game is running on the Serious Engine 4, housing some of the most advanced and dynamic visual effects available in a game engine. Some scenes also come very close to almost looking as if the scenes were path-traced (a technique perfected for gaming via the Brigade Engine).

Pushing for high-end visuals with a lot of particle effects are a quick way to kill a game's frame-rate. In fact, we recently witnessed this transpire with Diablo III on the Xbox One, where after the game received a bump up from 900p to 1080p the game suffered some slowdown in the busier mob areas.

CroTeam will be optimizing The Talos Principle on the PS4 so as to avoid the same kind of slow-down when things get hot and heavy.

But what about the Xbox One? With Devolver Digital publishing the game it would seem like an instant shoe-in that the title would be on as many platforms as possible, including the Xbox One. Well, there's a very simple explanation as to why CroTeam's first-person puzzler won't be appearing on Microsoft's console and it has nothing to do with the parity clause.

Ladavac stated that...

“In the nutshell – we still weren’t able to get our hands on development kits for Xbox One. Without that, it’s hard to develop for it. :),”

Well, that kind of puts things into perspective, eh? No devkit equals no game.

Of course, there's still time for CroTeam to get their hands on kits and eventually work on a port of The Talos Principle for the Xbox One, but it would obviously have to arrive a lot later than the PC and the PS4 counterparts. Whether Microsoft would be okay with that is entirely up to them, but at this point I don't think that they can afford to continue to pass up console exclusives in the way that they have.